Shaman Pass

by Stan Jones

  Silver spoke now. “It’s common knowledge they didn’t get along, Dolly. Victor always called your grandson anaq.”

  She squinted in negation. “Maybe Victor need killing then. But Calvin never do it.”

  “Who’s his girlfriend?”

  “That Queenie. What’s her last name?” The old woman looked at Silver. “You know, she call bingo at the Lions Club?”

  “Buckland? Queenie Buckland?”

  The old woman lifted her eyebrows.

  “Could we come in and look through your grandson’s room?” Active asked.

  She looked at Silver and rolled her eyes. Active turned in time to see that Silver was doing the same.

  She opened the door wide and gestured at the interior of the house. It was a single room, and not a very big one at that. One corner was closed off with a curtain that concealed, judging from the smell, a honey bucket. Otherwise, the space was undivided.

  “That’s my room over there.” Dolly pointed at a single bed against one wall. “And that’s Calvin’s room.” Now she pointed with a shiny, smoke-yellowed finger at a sofa against another wall. “And this my kitchen.” She pointed at a two-burner camp stove sitting on a scarred plywood counter under some equally scarred plywood cabinets. “You done looking now?”

  Active thought for a while about what to say. “I’m sorry for your trouble” came to mind but didn’t quite seem to fit.

  “Thank you. Will you call us when your grandson gets home?” He handed her a business card.

  She squinted a no and pushed it away. “I’ll tell him to call you if he want to.”

  Active put the card in his pocket, and followed Silver out of the kunnichuk. “Your guys talk to the girlfriend already?” Active asked when they were back in the Suburban.

  Silver shook his head. “Just Dolly. Queenie’s virgin territory, so to speak.”

  THEY FOUND Queenie Buckland stocking the Pepsi machine at the Lions Club bingo hall in preparation for that night’s game. She was tall, fat, and broad-shouldered, like a linebacker with breasts. A heavy jaw gave her face a certain menacing gravity, redeemed only by laughing eyes. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt that said IF YOU LIKE MY HEADLIGHTS YOU’LL LOVE MY BUMPER. Like Maiyumerak, she had a tooth missing in front, and Active found himself wondering how it affected their kissing.

  When they asked if she had seen her boyfriend the day before, her answer matched Dolly Maiyumerak’s account: Calvin had shown up around six with a sheefish and she cooked it for dinner.

  “How long did he stay?” Active asked.

  Queenie popped a Pepsi and took a swallow. “Let’s see, seem like we watch that Millionaire program, then we you-know couple hours, then he go home around midnight, maybe one o’clock.”

  “You-know?” Active asked.

  “Uh-huh.” She lifted her eyebrows and smiled a big smile that showed them the gap where her tooth had been. “You know. Quiyuk.”

  “A couple of hours of quiyuk,” Silver said when they got to the Suburban. “You wouldn’t think it, the scrawny little shit.”

  Active grunted. “You believe her?”

  “About the two hours?”

  “About the rest of it.”

  Silver shrugged. “She could be lying for him. Just like Dolly could.”

  Active turned it over in his mind, thinking of Victor Solomon dead on the ice, of Calvin Maiyumerak’s rusty snowmachine and ramshackle dogsled, and the one-room home of Dolly Maiyumerak. “What’s the deal with Dolly and Calvin anyway? Why do they live like that? Where are his parents?”

  “They live out in Ebrulik. I guess when Dolly got too old to take care of herself, Calvin’s dad, Dolly’s son, sent him down here to live with her. Apparently Calvin’s mother can’t stand the old lady so she couldn’t move up to Ebrulik. You know how it is with mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “But Calvin’s basically feral,” Silver said. “He likes to live the old way as much as he can, won’t take a regular job. Except for this business about Inupiat sovereignty, I don’t think he has much idea what goes on in the outside world. He traps in the winter and commercial fishes in the summer. Dolly gets some social security and some welfare and sews the mittens and ruffs from whatever it is he catches, and they get by. Somehow.”

  Active started the Suburban and headed for the Public Safety Building. “If you could call it that.”

  Silver nodded. “Tough life. They’re tough people, I guess.”

  “Tough enough to kill Victor Solomon?”

  Silver was silent, thinking it over. “Yeah, I believe so. I think Calvin just plain hated old Victor. And, you know, there’s the talk about him killing dogs with his bare hands.” Silver shook his head.

  “Victor used to call him anaq, huh?” Anaq was included in Active’s limited but growing vocabulary of Inupiaq words. It meant shit. “To his face?”

  Silver nodded. “And in public. Like when Victor had us throw Calvin out of that tribal council meeting. ‘Haul away this piece of anaq before I throw it in a honey bucket’ is what Victor said when we showed up.”

  “Well, that’s pure Eskimo.”

  Silver nodded. “Plus, Calvin probably figured Victor would go out and find Uncle Frosty on the tundra and bring him back and then work out some way to get Calvin thrown in jail for the burglary. He had to know it wouldn’t end as long as Victor was alive.”

  Active thought it over as the Suburban rolled smoothly up Third Street, the only paved road in Chukchi. “I have to find Calvin,” he said finally.

  “Yeah,” Silver said. “I guess you do.”

  “SO, THAT’S about it,” Active said an hour later as he finished his briefing, closed his notebook, and looked up at Captain Patrick Carnaby, commander of the Chukchi detachment of the Alaska State Troopers. “We obviously have to find Calvin.”

  “Obviously.” Carnaby chewed his lower lip for a moment. “Calvin Maiyumerak, huh?”

  “You know him?”

  “A little. Seen him around town, heard him ranting on the radio about Inupiat sovereignty . . . kind of a hothead, I guess.”

  “There was definitely that bad blood between him and Victor,” Active said. “Nobody likes being called anaq all the time.”

  “Yeah, I guess old Victor could be a real son of a bitch.” Carnaby nodded, seeming lost in thought.

  “And Silver says Calvin kills dogs with his bare hands, so that old Dolly can sew them into ruffs and mittens for the tourists.”

  “Really?” Carnaby said. “Who’d a thunk it? So how you gonna find Calvin?”

  “I guess I don’t see any point in going after him.”

  “Oh?” Carnaby lifted his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry.

  Active shook his head. “There’s two possibilities. One, he’s out hunting caribou, like Dolly says, even though she professes not to know where. If that’s true, he’ll come back on his own.”

  Carnaby nodded. “And?”

  “And possibility two is, he’s not hunting caribou, he’s running.”

  Carnaby nodded again, and grinned. “And where’s he going to go?”

  Now Active nodded. “Exactly. I think he only has three real choices, all bad. A, he can hide out on the tundra, but eventually he’ll run out of supplies and have to come into a village, or maybe somebody will just run into him out there.”

  Active pointed at a map of Alaska on the wall behind Carnaby’s desk. “B, maybe he can make it on that wreck of a snowmachine to someplace where he can catch a plane, but we’ll be waiting.”

  Another nod from Carnaby.

  “Or, C, he can hide out with a friend or relative in one of the villages, maybe Ebrulik, where his parents live.”

  Carnaby grinned again. “In which case it’ll be all over town in about five minutes.”

  “So we wait,” Active said. “We watch Dolly’s house here. I already put the word out to the airlines, the public safety officers in our villages, and to th
e troopers and city cops in Nome, Barrow, Kotzebue, Fairbanks, and Galena. And I put a message on Kay-Chuck saying the troopers need to contact Calvin Maiyumerak and anybody encountering him should let us know. He’s bound to turn up.”

  “Sounds right.” Carnaby’s grin was bigger than ever. “Low-impact police work. Low impact on our travel budget, low impact on the manpower situation in this office.”

  Active grinned, too, at how cheap Carnaby was. Still, the Republicans in the legislature were always pounding on state agencies to do less with more, and Carnaby seemed to find ways to put life into the vapid political cliché. “Plus which, Chukchi P.D. is carrying part of the load on this one because of the museum burglary,” Active said, to make Carnaby feel even better.

  “What about the harpoon?” Carnaby said. “Any fingerprints there?”

  “Didn’t check yet. You want to?”

  Carnaby nodded, grinning in enthusiasm. He was known to the officers beneath him—and those above—as the Super Trooper. That wasn’t just because, at six-two, square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he was a walking recruitment poster. It was also because he had some kind of ESP about cases and could normally juggle intradepartment politics with his left hand while juggling local politics with his right.

  Besides which, he was a fingerprint expert. Not just an expert, but an enthusiast also, who wrote papers about cold-weather fingerprinting for law-enforcement journals.

  Active went to his office and brought the harpoon to Carnaby. “I’ll let you know in a couple of hours,” the captain said.

  Active trotted downstairs and stopped at Dispatch to see if he and Lucy Generous were still on for lunch.

  They were, she told him with a huge smile, so they drove to the Arctic Dragon in the trooper Suburban.

  After they ordered—Szechuan beef for him, teriyaki salmon for her—he sketched the Victor Solomon murder for her. That was one of the advantages of having a dispatcher for a girlfriend. You could discuss cases with her. Plus, Lucy was a lifelong resident of Chukchi. She normally knew more about a breaking case than most of the cops in town, including himself.

  “Do you know either of them?” he asked when he was finished. He dipped a spoonful of the Arctic Dragon’s miso soup and waited for her reaction.

  She frowned for a moment, then squinted a no. “Not really. Victor lived alone and didn’t have many friends that I ever heard of, except maybe a few at church. I think maybe he was too mean to have friends. And Calvin only moved down here from Ebrulik a couple years ago. I don’t think I ever met him.”

  She giggled, covering her mouth in that way she had, her loveliness momentarily distracting him from what she was saying. “But I did dispatch on him a couple times. Like when he put the seal oil in the tour buses. Aqaa!”

  Active refocused and grinned. That was another word in his small but growing vocabulary of Inupiaq. It meant “Stinky!”

  “So Victor went to church?” he asked.

  She nodded. “All the time, pretty much. He was Catholic, a parish deacon, I think.”

  Active frowned. “Hmph.”

  “What?”

  “I’m surprised to hear he was so churchy.”

  “Why?”

  “He sounds a little un-Christian. Had no friends, always called Calvin anaq.”

  “Is that why Calvin killed him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you think your grandmother knew him?”

  “Aana Pauline? I don’t know, she goes to the Friends Church and they don’t mix with the Catholics too much. But I could ask.”

  He lifted his eyebrows and they moved on to a discussion of that night’s dinner.

  She would be in class at the community college when he got home from work, but she would leave something in the oven for him. Pauline had traded some mittens she made for half a caribou and the roast was from that. It would still be hot when he got there, and he could eat that, but he had to promise to eat some salad with it. He bobbed along pleasantly on the flow of her chatter, then lifted his eyebrows again when she was done.

  As always, he felt slightly guilty about the marriage-like state they shared. He was getting what a man normally got out of marriage—sex, food, and laundry. But she was not getting what a woman normally got: commitment, children, and financial support.

  He gazed out the Dragon’s picture window, which overlooked Beach Street and Chukchi Bay. Under the bright, hazy sky and a dim red eye of sun, the west wind was still rolling in. It must have picked up a little—now it was sweeping before it a thin layer of snow that undulated over the sea ice like fog.

  It was not exactly the imbalance in the relationship that made him feel guilty, he thought as he watched the snow ripple toward them. It was his knowledge that she disliked this imbalance, but was too uncertain of his affection to challenge it.

  “What?” she was saying when he came around to the conversation again.

  “Nothing. I very much enjoy your company, is all.”

  “And I love you,” she said.

  He had no comeback to this, so he smiled and busied himself with his Szechuan beef. Lucy lowered her eyes and concentrated on the last bites of her salad, then started on the salmon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “ IT’S JIM SILVER.”

  Active struggled to swim up from his recurring bullet dream and take the phone he sensed had trilled a few seconds earlier. But he drifted down into it again, jerking the trigger of the useless gun pointed at the shadowed figure coming at him with a butcher knife. The knife was hard to see this time, though. Perhaps it was something else, a—

  Lucy Generous poked him in the shoulder with the stubby antenna of the cordless. “Wake up. It’s Jim Silver.”

  He started, awake at last, and rolled onto an elbow to take the phone. “Yeah, this is Nathan.” He was panting as usual from the bullet dream and Silver picked it up over the phone.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” the chief said.

  Active got his breathing under control, then forced out a chuckle that he hoped sounded lewd enough to confirm Silver’s mistaken guess. “Nothing that won’t keep,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “One of my officers just called in,” Silver said. “He cruised past Dolly Maiyumerak’s house a minute ago and Calvin’s snowmachine was parked in front.”

  Active cleared his throat and walked into the bathroom as he spoke. “Your guy talk to him?”

  “No, he called in for instructions.”

  Active filled a glass under the faucet and took two quick swallows. “Anything going on inside the place?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. The lights are all out.”

  “OK, I’ll get right over there,” Active said. “Ask the officer to wait and keep an eye on things, will you?”

  “Maybe I’ll cruise on over there myself.”

  “Sure,” Active said. “You know Calvin already.”

  He clicked off the phone, stepped out of the bathroom, and looked at Lucy, who was staring at him with the familiar mixture of reproach and anxiety. He looked away.

  “It was the bullet dream, wasn’t it? And you’ll go see Nelda Qivits again.”

  He was silent. These charges no longer required a plea.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Her voice was soft now, caring rather than challenging.

  “I just can’t. You know that.”

  “Well, have fun then! God knows we haven’t been having much of that in this bed lately!” She rolled onto her right side and pulled the quilt up until it just covered her left ear, which was how she slept.

  He stood frozen, not wanting to leave it like this but unable to think of a way out. Maybe a joke.

  “You’re not worried Calvin Maiyumerak might harpoon me?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  Active shook his head and returned to the bathroom to rinse his face in the bathroom sink, inspected the result, and decided the image of the troopers would not be tarnished beyond repair if he didn’t shave today,
as it was a Saturday.

  He went out to the kitchen of the trooper bachelor cabin and tried to think of a breakfast that wouldn’t take long to make or eat. Since Lucy had moved in more or less full-time a few months ago, he had lost what little knack he ever had for food preparation. Lucy bought the groceries and cooked them, and only she could cook what she bought. Her groceries were too complicated for him—they had to be mixed, blanched, blended, basted, battered, marinated, and subjected to other procedures he couldn’t name—which was probably why they were delicious when she cooked them.

  He rummaged in the refrigerator and came up with a slice of caribou roast from the night before. He put it on a pilot bread cracker, poured ketchup on top, and thought about coffee.

  There were grounds in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, he knew, and a gleaming black-and-chrome Mr. Coffee on the counter by the microwave. But it seemed like too much business for so early in the day.

  Then he remembered that he had not emptied and washed the Mr. Coffee from yesterday morning. He shook the urn and heard the blessed sound of sloshing. He poured a cup, set it in the microwave, punched in ninety seconds, and hit the start button. He hoped, as he recalled that he hadn’t closed the bedroom door, that the sound of the microwave’s fan wouldn’t wake Lucy.

  “That’s not yesterday’s coffee, is it?”

  Well, at least she was letting go of the bullet-dream thing and willing to argue about something normal. He looked through the glass of the microwave door at the cup, which was sending up the first tendrils of steam. “No, I’m just heating up some of that leftover caribou.” He held his breath to see if her truth radar had kicked in yet. When she hadn’t answered after fifteen seconds, he released the breath.

  When the ninety seconds were up, he wolfed down the pilot cracker and caribou, went outside, set the coffee in the Suburban’s cup holder, and started the rig. Then he unplugged the cord for the Suburban’s engine heater from the electric socket under the light outside his kunnichuk, coiled the cord, and looped it around the radio antenna. When he got in and turned on the blower, it produced a little heat and no squeal, making him glad the Trooper energy-conservation program didn’t extend to living quarters.